Peterloo

*Spoiler alert* – (may contain spoilers from the start)

The picture opens – we are met with the sight of Joshua, a young British soldier at the Battle of Waterloo. He survives, broken and bewildered, only to die four years later at the hands of British troops in Manchester City Centre.

Joshua was armed at Waterloo and encouraged by his leaders to fight the enemy. At Peterloo, he and his friends are told to discard their weapons even though they know armed yeomanry will be present at the demonstration.

Is it any wonder he survived the war but not the peace? The history of the working class movement has always involved intense debate about whether to fight the enemy, or simply plead with them; revolution or reform. Peterloo depicts this debate beautifully.

The story sheds so much light on everything that came after – the Chartists, the Trade Union movement, struggles for the vote the 1926 General Strike, , The Miners, Wapping, The Poll Tax and, even now, the Labour resurgence under Corbyn.  – all of them riven by the same internal debate – do we fight, or do we plead?

Joshua appears all the way through the film, in his red tunic, surrounded by family, friends and acquaintances. His are the shell-shocked, bewildered eyes through which we see the other characters.

His are the eyes through which we see the blacksmith whom he asks for work. He is abandoned by the country he risked life and limb for, like so many ordinary soldiers continue to be. Homeless, distressed, traumatised and unemployed, they can be found in shop doorways and soup kitchens from London to Glasgow, from 1815 to 2018…

… unlike General Sir John Byng, the man in charge of the army at Peterloo, who was rewarded with command of the British Army in the North of England, and not at all left to beg for work on the streets of Lancashire like the men he had commanded at Waterloo.

So incompetent, privileged and entitled was General Sir John Byng that he failed to even turn up at Peterloo because the conceited bastard had two horses running at York races that day.

The population of Lancashire – and beyond – had other ideas about what was more important on August 16, 1819. About half the population of  Manchester and the surrounding towns, including whole families and many women and children – in total numbering as many as 80,000 people – gathered peacefully and unarmed to attend a meeting – not a demonstration, mind, but a meeting with a desk, table and chairs for the organisers and their only speaker, Henry Hunt. It was the biggest mass meeting in British history at the time. What did they want? The vote.

Unarmed. Of course they were unarmed – it was a civil demonstration. Who turns up to a demo armed? The army, that’s who. It’s taken as read now, but in the days and weeks leading up to Peterloo, many saw it as essential that as many demonstrators as possible should not only be armed but organised into a defence unit to protect the women and children from mounted cavalry armed with swords.

When Henry Hunt, the moderate reformer from London, stood up to address the massive assembly, he was greeted with cries of “Liberty or death!” and many banners bearing those same word. Those that fell at Peterloo died for your freedom as much as those that fell at The Somme, and deserved to be remembered for it.

But Henry Hunt opposed calls for the arming of the people, fearing that this would provoke the authorities to violently suppress the movement. The violent suppression of the movement began promptly upon the start of his speech, and, thanks to him, no one had the means to defend the women and children, or Joshua, who were cut down at leisure by a well-armed military force steeled in the Napoleonic wars and the wars of colonial punishment in Ireland.

The lesson is that fighting beats pleading. Beware of those voices who call for moderation, even in today’s Labour Party. They will get us nowhere and are dangerous to our cause. Had the assembled crowd had its way and had been allowed to carry arms, a force of 80,000 may well have inflicted defeat on the British Army that day and left the undemocratic, murderous junta that ruled these isles back then vulnerable to the same kind of revolutionary change that had happened not long before in France, in 1789. (That same year, the Royal Navy suffered its first mutiny, at the hands of one Fletcher Christian.)

Motivated by fear of such a revolution, having seen kings, dukes, princes and knights beheaded and replaced by people from lower classes, our own king, Prince Regent, Earls and Dukes set about the destruction of the movement for popular electoral reform with a zeal. It was, after all, the French Revolution that had led to the disastrous Napoleonic Wars in the first place.

As depicted in Peterloo, the sort of people that ran the country and the towns numbered among them some of the worst human scum ever to emerge from Hell. They sat on magistrates’ benches imposing the death sentence for petty theft; transported people to the penal colony of Australia and passed Corn Laws – a tax on corn which starved the population to protect the profits of the rich. Revolution would have been a just end for them.

In contrast, the depiction of ordinary people is as Mike Leigh has depicted ordinary people before – decent, struggling, flawed and diverse. It is a bit of as shame that this film is being restricted to cinemas such as The Duke of York’s in Brighton.

The rulers won the day. The fight for the vote would take another century to achieve votes not only for working men but for women. Women organised for the vote in 1819, separately and alongside the men. The prevailing view was that a vote for a working man would be a vote for the working family as a whole. Seen that way, it becomes easier to see why so many women joined the movement for the vote, whereas seen from today’s perspective, supporting votes for men only would be an unthinkably reactionary position.

The rulers won, but other battles followed. Only a few years later, laws were passed restricting the activities of trade unions, which were forming in response to satanic industrial conditions and organising huge strikes. In response to those strikes, Robert Peel was to found a special force to deal with them without using swords. This special force is called the Police, and it’s important to remember their origins.

Not long after Peterloo, another huge popular movement demanding the vote erupted all over Britain – the Chartists. Rather than face another Peterloo, successive governments widened the electorate to include more and more of the population. The vote was eventually won.

When looking at history, look not for kings and queens but for the wars, revolutions and social upheavals which shaped the ages that came after them. Look for 1789, 1914, 1917, 1926. And look for Peterloo.